What's the Magician's Other Hand Doing While we're All Watching the War?

[xoxoxoBruce]

I wonder if Ray-Gun ever did the job. I always had the feeling he was a talking head. Maybe it was a subconscious hope that someone....anyone else was really running the show.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally posted by dave
(For the record, I think the tax cut was a bad idea. It really *was* geared toward the rich. The government should be taking that surplus and using it to create jobs or <b>something</b>.)

Dave -- that's exactly how you create jobs. You stop siphoning money out of the economy to fund the less-creative public sector. Even if 100 cents on the dollar of funds allocated to "create jobs or something" were used by a government agency to "CJOS," it still wouldn't be as good at it if the money were just left in businessmen's pockets in the first place. Keep in mind that trickledown works for one transcendent reason: it is the rich who hire, thus creating jobs. Poor people never hire anybody. They can't afford it.

Taxation amounts to parasitic drag on an economy. A powerful economy can tolerate quite a lot of taxation, but the less taxation is around, the more powerful the economy is, and instantly so. Taxation really only exists to handle things that an economy agrees are needed, but which no one has actually managed to generate wealth from -- basically, these things are going to involve the protection of wealth, and of wealth generation. It's rather like antlers on a deer -- they have a metabolic cost to the deer to generate them, but one of their functions is to keep pumas from killing them. I know this is a secondary function -- the primary one is to make for a sexy deer ("Mildred, check out the rack on that one! Yoo-hoo, big boy -- over here!"), but it nonethless makes quite a difference to the deer who chases a puma away rather than getting eaten. The profit from all that expenditure, which is not down in where the deer lives as it were, is indirect, but present. Where the art of it comes in is not to fall into the temptation of having the government become the one-stop shopping for all goods and services. Soviet Russia fell into that one, and we all know what a roaring success that was. Ordinary Americans may experience this without traveling to North Korea or the People's Republic of China by signing on with the military for a hitch or two -- that was the exact path I took and it taught me a lesson. I've been up in the deer's antlers, and I've been in the deer's sinews. I do more good in the latter place.

I close by remarking that too much taxation is very bad: when the lamprey gets bigger than the fish, the fish dies. Not right away, but soon. If too much taxation is bad, then next to no taxation is a good thing, right? Dave, I think you are now ready to start studying economics. I recommend trying some libertarian texts on taxes -- they think a lot about this kind of thing, more than the Mommy Party or the Daddy Party. Probably the most accessible economics text is H. Hazlitt's slim volume Economics In One Lesson.

[Whit]

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I'm with you on taxation being a drag on the economy. This being said I think Dave was right is saying that particular tax cut was a bad idea. The trickledown theory doesn't work when people can't afford to buy any new products. The business men will just hold onto the cash untill a better day. That's why the economy still sucks. It'll get better in response to all the oil that's about to start coming out of Iraq.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;In a time like this, when a lot of jobs are being lost and the Dow is dropping more often than not it would be better to start at the ground up. If the poor had a little bit more then they would buy more. More purchaces equals more jobs.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I'd like to back this up with the fact that the job market got worse, not better after the cuts were made.

[Torrere]

The reason that the government had a surplus in 99 was that the dot com boom was raging and taxes generated more money than they knew what to do with. The Office of Management and Budget predicted that the conditions would stick around the for a while, and they didn't. It didn't really have much to do with Clinton.

I wish there was a successful third party, but I feel that the only way they could do that would be by draining voters from one of the two major parties, giving victory to the other major party.

I'm talking about people here, not companies. I fail to see how those in the top 1% taking back something like 36% of the tax cut (whereas they only pay something like 25% of taxes - meaning that they <b>took back more, proportionally, than they paid</b>) really helps me out. Okay, so people making a few million a year are taxed less. They buy a nicer car and some guy at Mercedes-Benz sleeps easy knowing that he's not getting laid off this week. Whoop-ty-do.